But lately we’ve been seeing one new type of survey a lot: IT surveys.

Why IT Surveys?

There are a ton of reasons your IT department would want to create an IT survey. Here are a few:

Keep things documented. It’s good to have a record of how many support requests are coming in, and how many are quickly resolved.

Analyze company-wide IT issues. You can set up reports to see how many problems are coming from different machines, users, etc, then take action on them.

Make it easier for users to report IT problems. By creating a survey and embedding it (or posting a link) on your company intranet, users can easily submit their issues in one place. Having all your information centrally-located is much more efficient than trying to sort through instant messages, emails, and other channels.

What are some ways to make my IT surveys better?

SurveyGizmo offers a lot of features to improve IT surveys:

1. Use Show/Hide and Skip Logic to collect better data. By using survey logic like Show/Hide Logic and Page Jumping, you can ask specific questions that apply to specific recurring issues. Someone who can’t access the internet, for instance, would require different follow-up questions than someone who is having trouble with a virus.

By separating issues, you can also improve the processing of your IT support queue. It often makes much more sense to focus on several tickets you know are easily solvable and clearing them from the list before moving on to tackle bigger issues.

2. Auto-populate system information. Rather than ask your users to enter what sort of computer they have, you can pull that information automatically. The System merge codes let you include information on the user’s system configuration as part of your survey data.

Rather than pass the system info through as a hidden variable, we recommend displaying the information to the user via a merge code & asking them to verify that this is the machine they’re having trouble with.

Again, you can later use this system information in reports to determine which browsers and system configurations are causing the most problems throughout your company.

3. Create a queue. In a recent blog, we showed how we used the SurveyGizmo API to create a queue for our weekly Pancake Thursday breakfast. By employing that same technique, you can create a page for your IT support team to go through and check off the problems that have been solved, then automatically send a follow-up email or a report.

These are just a few of the SurveyGizmo features you can use to create IT surveys – if you can think of other ways to go about it, leave them in the comments!